It's twenty past one in the morning and you're rehearsing a conversation that happened at four in the afternoon.
You've replayed it eleven times. You've rewritten your part, then rewritten theirs. You've found the sentence you should have said, and then found a better one, and then realised the better one would've made it worse. You've drafted a message you won't send. You've decided it doesn't matter, twice. Your body is lying perfectly still and your mind is running laps of a track it built itself.
And the most frustrating part is that you know. You know you're overthinking. You've read the articles. You could teach a short course on it. So you think about how to stop thinking, and that's lap twelve.
How do you stop overthinking?
You stop overthinking by working below the thoughts, not with them. Overthinking is the mind circling an emotional charge it can't resolve, so every technique that adds more thinking, even calmer thinking, feeds the loop. When the charge underneath is met and removed, the mind has nothing left to solve, and it quiets on its own.
That's the short answer. The rest of this page is why it's true, and what to do with it tonight.
Why can't I think my way out of overthinking?
Because you're trying to use the problem as the tool.
Imagine knowing the exact name of the song stuck in your head. You can spell it, hum it, tell me who wrote it and what year it came out. None of that stops it playing. Knowing a great deal about the song isn't the same as the song stopping.
Overthinking works the same way. You have the name for it. You can describe its habits in fine detail, when it starts, what triggers it, how long it runs. And every one of those descriptions is another thought, laid on top of the thoughts you were trying to stop. The mind can analyse overthinking brilliantly. What it can't do is analyse its way into silence, any more than you can shout someone into whispering.
So when people tell me they've tried everything and still can't switch it off, I believe them. They haven't failed. They've been handed a tool that works on the wrong layer.
What is my mind actually doing when it overthinks?
It's trying to solve a feeling.
Watch a loop closely and you'll find something under it. Not the topic, the conversation or the email or the decision, but a sensation. A tightness under the breastbone. A small drop in the stomach. A kind of hum of not-okay. The loop starts there, every time, and the thoughts are the mind's attempt to do something about it.
That's what minds do. They see a problem and reach for their one tool, which is thinking. If the feeling says I'm in danger of being rejected, the mind runs every version of the conversation looking for the one where you're safe. If it says I might get this wrong, the mind simulates every outcome looking for certainty. It isn't broken. It's working very hard on an assignment it can't complete, because the feeling was never a puzzle. It's a charge, an old one usually, fused to a conclusion you drew a long time ago about what happens when people are displeased or plans go wrong.
This is also why understanding your past doesn't change you. The understanding lives in the same place as the loop. The charge lives somewhere else.
Why do smart people overthink the most?
Picture yourself tangled in a fishing line, twenty feet under water. You can see the knot. You can name it and describe exactly how the line wraps your ankle. And the moment you reach for it, your own movement pulls it tighter.
I think of that image whenever a brilliant person sits down in front of me and says, I just can't stop thinking. Intelligence isn't the way out of this particular tangle. The very mind that sees the pattern is the hand tied to the line. The sharper it is, the more elaborate the knot it can tie while trying to undo itself.
One case I think of often is the lawyer whose years of internal identity conflict resolved in minutes, through a deep identity shift. Years of conflict, and then minutes, once the work went under the argument rather than into it. The speed isn't what matters in that story. What matters is where the work landed.
What can I do the next time a loop starts?
Here's a practice for the middle of a loop, including the one at twenty past one. It takes about two minutes.
First, catch the loop and name it plainly, without any judgment attached: I'm looping. Just that. Not why, not about what.
Second, drop the topic. Don't argue with it and don't try to resolve it. Let the conversation or the decision sit to one side for a moment, the way you'd put down a bag.
Third, go looking for the feeling the loop was circling. Scan from your throat down to your stomach and find where the not-okay is sitting. It'll be somewhere specific. Put your attention on it, not your thoughts about it, just your attention, and keep it there for five slow breaths. Don't try to make it leave.
Most people notice two things. The feeling is smaller than the loop made it seem, often much smaller. And for as long as their attention is on the sensation, the thinking thins out, because the mind isn't needed. You're finally dealing with what it was trying to deal with.
This won't remove the charge. That's deeper work. But it shows you, in your own body, where the loop really starts, and that's the discovery that changes how you'll relate to every loop after this one.
Why does the loop keep coming back?
Because meeting a charge for five breaths isn't the same as removing it.
The feeling you found will be there tomorrow, fused to the same old conclusion, ready to start the mind running again the next time life rhymes with the original scene. That's the part no technique can reach, and it's why overthinking can survive years of apps, notebooks and good advice. They quiet the surface. The source keeps producing.
This is exactly the ground I've worked on for over twenty years. When people ask me what I do, I tell them in one sentence: I help people who understand their patterns but still repeat them finally stop, by removing what was never theirs and coming home to who they were underneath, using the RS Method. Overthinking is one of the most common ways that pattern shows up. It's a pattern you understand and still repeat, in its purest form.
What's underneath all the thinking?
Something that doesn't think at all.
In the gap you found during the practice, when the loop thinned for a few breaths, there was still someone there. Awake, noticing, not needing to solve anything. That's not a technique. That's you, the one who's been watching every thought come and go since you were small, never once caught in any of them. The loop runs in front of it the way weather runs across a sky.
When the charge is removed, that's what people describe: not a better class of thought, but a quiet that was always there, finally uncovered. You can read more about how that works on the RS Method page.
If you'd like to begin from that quiet rather than from another technique, I made a free masterclass for exactly this: Who Am I? It doesn't give your mind another assignment. It takes you under the assignments to the one who's been doing them.
Tonight, when the laps start, remember you don't have to win the argument. You only have to notice who's been listening to it.
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.